Stories

21 occupations of the future

In a new report, Cognizant, the IT services firm, identifies 21 jobs that, given economic and commercial trends, people could reasonably be expected to hold, like chief trust officer and man-machine teaming manager.

Why it matters: The key question of the age of automation is whether this time of technological disruption is different from all the others that have occurred over the last two centuries. That is, will the economy produce sufficient well-paying jobs for everyone, or will there be profound and intractable joblessness? To begin to answer that question, we've needed to know what at least some of those jobs might be.

How it's done: Cognizant found proxies for them in Bureau of Labor Statistics data — existing occupations that the agency already follows. You can flip through the occupations above and see how the BLS foresees employment and salary developing for each. Next year, the BLS will update the numbers in a new report covering 2018-2028.